A software attack on hardware.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/badpower-attack-can-rig-a-fast-charger-to-melt-your-devices
'BadPower' Attack Can Rig a Fast Charger to Melt Your Devices

On some fast chargers, an attacker can exploit the read and write ability over the USB port to send malicious code to alter the charger’s firmware, according to researchers in China.

Find out what the FTC knows and doesn’t know?

FTC to Host Virtual PrivacyCon 2020 on July 21
WHAT: The Federal Trade Commission will host PrivacyCon 2020 to examine the latest research and trends related to consumer privacy and data security.
WHEN: Tuesday, July 21, 2020, 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. ET
WHERE: The event will be held online. A link to view PrivacyCon will be posted the morning of the event to ftc.gov and the event page.
WHO: The event will feature opening remarks by FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection Director Andrew Smith, as well as presentations and discussions on a variety of privacy and data security research.
TWITTER: The event will be tweeted live from the FTC’s Twitter page (@FTC) using the hashtag #PrivacyCon20.

Move fast, with the best of intentions, and you often skip the fiddly bits.

https://www.darkreading.com/application-security/england-test-and-trace-program-violates-gdpr-privacy-law/d/d-id/1338389?&web_view=true

England 'Test and Trace' Program Violates GDPR Privacy Law

The UK government has come under fire for launching a countrywide "test and trace" program without completing a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA), a mandate required under the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Test and Trace, also known as "Track and Trace," is a National Health Service initiative designed to track contacts of people who test positive for COVID-19. It requires people to share sensitive information, including names, birthdates, postal codes, people they live with, places they have recently traveled, and names and contact details of people with whom they've been in close contact.
Officials confirmed this program, which launched in May, has been running without a complete DPIA to assess how all of this personal data could be compromised.






City driving is complicated.
https://www.ft.com/content/96d3eeff-7f52-46e3-a8a8-aeb668472034
Self-driving industry takes to the highway after robotaxi failure

Sector focuses on long-haul trucks and passenger vehicles after ‘autonomous disillusionment’

… “Around 2014, we did a whole bunch of math on costs and realised … you could actually underbid not just Uber and Lyft” — about $2 per mile — “but car ownership,” estimated to be less than $1 a mile, Mr Thrun recalls. “That became our goal.”
… The concept of highway-only autonomy is currently capturing the attention of the industry. Instead of trying to solve the myriad challenges of go-anywhere-robotaxis, engineers could focus on making it work on just highways to begin with.

Access to research…

https://www.bespacific.com/open-access-plan-s-to-allow-publishing-in-any-journal/

Open-access Plan S to allow publishing in any journal

Nature – “Funding agencies behind the radical open-access (OA) initiative Plan S have announced a policy that could make it possible for researchers to bypass journals’ restrictions on open publishing. The change could allow scientists affected by Plan S to publish in any journal they want — even in subscription titles, such as Science, that haven’t yet agreed to comply with the scheme. Plan S, which kicks in from 2021, aims to make scientific and scholarly works free to read and reproduce as soon as they are published. Research funders that have signed up to it include the World Health Organization, Wellcome in London, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington, and 17 national funders, mostly in Europe. The European Commission also says it will follow the plan. Under the initiative, scientists funded by Plan S agencies must publish their work OA. If a journal doesn’t allow that, researchers can instead post an accepted version of their article — an author accepted manuscript, or AAM — in an online repository as soon as their paper appears. This kind of author-initiated sharing is sometimes called green open access. Under Plan S, it comes with a key condition that has so far been anathema to many subscription journals: the AAM must be shared under a liberal ‘CC-BY’ publishing licence that would allow others to republish and translate the work…”






Free is good.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/20/ai-for-anyone-founders-teaching-ai-to-students-for-free-to-give-back.html
These young immigrant brothers are teaching A.I. to high-schoolers for free: We want to give kids ‘a lucky break’
… the brothers co-founded a nonprofit called AI for Anyone.
… So far, AI for Anyone has taught approximately 50 workshops, reaching over 55,000 people, according to the Chouderys. It also has a monthly newsletter, All About AI, with over 33,000 subscribers, as well as a new podcast, AI For You. (One episode has an interview with Hod Lipson, a well-renowned professor in the AI space.)
The non-profit is now funded by corporate sponsorships from Hypergiant and Komodo Health, so the workshops are free to students and teachers.






Imagine Bill Gates introducing one of my lectures…
https://www.freetech4teachers.com/2020/07/create-talking-pictures-of-famous-people.html
Create Talking Pictures of Famous People
… ChatterPix Kids is a free app (Android version here, iPad version here) that lets students take pictures or upload pictures, draw a smile, and then record themselves talking for up to thirty seconds. The finished product is saved as a video file on the students' iPads or Android tablets. That video file can then be shared in a variety of ways including in Google Classroom. The following videos demonstrate how to use the Android and iOS versions of ChatterPix Kids.